


Adoration is a Desert

by verilix



Category: Marco Polo (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 10:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7431584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verilix/pseuds/verilix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The desert is not so unlike loving an impossible love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adoration is a Desert

**Author's Note:**

> This started as something completely different, and I will reread it tomorrow for any major errors/ rewrites. I haven't seen the second series yet

There is life in the desert, so secretive and hidden. There is life in the singing wind, like silver bells and voiceless whispers, the shifting of the sand and the thin, high wailing of the stones that stand in a mockery of life. There are plants that grow, that know the secrets only Lazarus knew (of the race of men, at least), of life and death and rebirth. Green that browns and burns in the sun, in the reflected in the cresting dunes of endless sand – only to green again when the time comes for water to herald the time for breeding, for the beginnings of new life to be cast out into the bright abyss.

If you are careful, too, to look and observe, there is a more prosaic life – tiny animals well-versed in the practicalities of death and survival, that have only one life and thieve each hour, each day from the burning, clutching fingers of the sun and from each other. The snakes that leave the faintest of trails on the shifting sand, the tiny darting rodents that hide themselves away.

At night, the earth under your feet grows cold, and your breath catches on the chill glimmer of the stars that coat the dark of the sky. For all the burning heat of the sun, when the darkness stirs itself to sweep over the desert it is as though it never was – as though the warmth that soaked into bones and brains and souls was a nightmare. But if it was a nightmare, if the night was the waking world, it would not seem so friendly once the ice of the dark cooled your sweat and froze your fingers numb.

I only knew Venice, before my father came. Summer's heat was uncomfortable, true, but there was always water. The canals did not whisper sinister lullabies but chattered quietly – and the people on, around, and sometimes in, did not whisper or chatter but live, loud and constant and with every emotion a man or woman could feel. Winter's chill was nothing, a passing thing that could be fended off with blankets and fires.

I loved in Venice; I loved as a boy would, sighing over the pretty girls that sailed by with an absent smile, or giggling with their friends and family, caring nothing for the boys left watching after them, boys who they would never know. I kissed, once or twice, the daring and the curious who deemed me suitable for that risk. I dreamed of love, moderate and simple and familiar dreams as I dream of the mundane reality of Venice now.

I only knew Venice. I did not know the desert.

I learned it, travelling with my father. I learned the heart of it most clearly with you.

Being near you is as if I am held in the heart of the desert with the sun rising, chasing away the cold with your presence and my love. But it becomes unbearable knowing that if I stay too long, it will kill both of us. Being far from you is the night; I regain my senses, only to long for you when the ice of your absence touches my mind with doubt.

My only hope is the life in that wasteland, in the desert of my love. Hope that rises when you smile at me, speak to me, touch me. The wild plans we both concoct, that I believe you think on, that I wish you wanted. Like the plants in the desert, it lives and dies and lives again on almost nothing at all. Like the tiny animals that prey on each other, each new hope kills the last, causing us both pain and fear.

Like the whispers of the wind and sand and stone, they will lure me with sweet singing to my death and, if I am unlucky, you will come with me too.

Whether I am with you, or far from you, I can only feel relief from my pain for the shortest moment, when I remember that you are twice dead and twice living, wearing the name of a woman I could never touch, a shield guarding us from happiness together.

This cannot continue, Kokachin.


End file.
